Bradley Burston joins Yair Lapid in admitting that the Israeli left did not have the country's best interests in mind when it supported the disengagement:

But for many on the left, slamming the dungeon door on Yigal Amir didn't go nearly far enough. Following the 1995 assassination, the rage of the left - as well as its guilt over its often waffling support of Rabin - was so all-consuming, that it was not enough for its members to see Yigal Amir apprehended, indicted, convicted and imprisoned for the rest of his natural life.

The left wanted to see the right as a whole punished for the murder. The left wanted to see the right as a whole suffer for the crime. The left was willing to wait as long as necessary to see the right punished. Ten years later, the left would get its chance.

When Ariel Sharon floated the notion of expelling all settlers from the Gaza Strip and several settlements in the West Bank, the left kept quiet about the longterm wisdom of Israel taking unilateral actions that bypassed the Palestinian Authority.

How better to pain the right, than to erase entire swaths of the settlement enterprise. How better to pierce the very heart of the national religious right, than to use the Israel Defense Forces to oversee the expulsion of settler families, the demolition of settler homes, the dismantlement of settler schools, synagogues, hothouses, farms and small businesses.

If revenge is a dish best served cold, you couldn't get much colder than the left. There was little concern for the plight and the fate of the settler deportees, the baffled and distraught children, the deeply betrayed teens, the suddenly unemployed and homeless parents.

The right was finally paying the price for the assassination, and the left was there to watch every moment, live and in color, by satellite.

There was little speculation on the left as to the potential consequences of the act, the effect it might have on the rise of Hamas, the chance that jihadists would exploit the pullout to attack Sderot and other border towns, kibbutzim and moshavim within Israel.

There was little willingness on the left and among leftists in the media, to go after the prime minister over a long series of corruption suspicions. After all, this was Ariel Sharon, of all people, the vaunted champion of the right, the very symbol of settlement expansion, who was taking the settlement movement apart, red roof tile by red roof tile.